Daniel Tilson
Sometimes, it’s painful being right. You see, Gov. Scott this week publicly confirmed he’s opposed to ensuring affordable access to health insurance and healthcare for all Floridians.
Again.
With ultra-conservative Republicans in the Florida House still blocking the Senate from using Obamacare funding to insure more than 800,000 Floridians — thereby stopping 3-6 people from dying every day, ending the hidden healthcare cost-shift tax on the middle class, and creating a new wave of quality job creation and economic growth — the once-scandalized multimillionaire healthcare CEO turned governor chose sides.
Not yours, mine or ours.
This comes after two years of PR pretense. Worried about “likability” heading into his 2014 re-election campaign, the wildly unpopular governor announced, “We will support an expansion of our Medicaid program under the new healthcare law.”
I wrote then and have continued to since, about what a camouflage con game that was. All you had to do was scratch the surface of the tarnished, two-tailed trick coin that is professional politician Rick Scott, and you’d have revealed a bald-headed face beaming back and winking at you.
But most major media outlets bought it hook, line and sinker, failing to highlight the WTF factor. Here was a guy who came to fame in 2009 after founding the anti-Obamacare front group, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. He even hired the same PR firm that created the slanderously successful “Swift Boat” campaign that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. But they couldn’t torpedo the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Scott didn’t give up. He just moved his anti-Obamacare millions over to his 2010 gubernatorial campaign. After barely winning election against an ill-equipped opponent, he made actively opposing and interfering with ACA implementation in Florida a hallmark of his administration.
So how in the world did that history earn Scott the right to be taken at his word about suddenly supporting the Obamacare plan to cover Florida’s uninsured, and ensure ACA success?
It didn’t.
Two years later, after doing everything in his power to do nothing whatsoever to get the Florida House to agree to expansion, Team Scott’s game plan came into focus with this week’s announcement. But media coverage mostly stuck to the “flip-flop” angle, characterizing pro-expansion legislative and business leaders as “perplexed.”
WTF is so perplexing?
Scott’s position on insuring the uninsured never changed. As he said this week, “I like the program we have right now.” That’s the one leaving 800,000 mostly working poor Floridians uninsured, while the rest of us are forced to pay for their care, while foregoing the moral imperative and massive economic benefits of insuring them.
And so launches the next chapter in Team Scott’s propaganda playbook: “Blame Obama & Big Government, Again.” Knowing the federal Low Insurance Pool (LIP) program (giving Florida about $2 billion annually to help with uninsured costs) had to be replaced by ACA-funded expansion this year, Scott and the Florida House are still blocking expansion, daring the feds to end LIP funding. The icing on the cake in Obamacare’s face is a disgraceful disinformation campaign preemptively blaming “Big Government” for the collateral damage to come.
Their goal is to get as close to the kind of private, for-profit imitation of reform they’ve wanted all along. If they fail, what the hell, they’re OK with the way things are right now.
You see, those 800,000-plus uninsured people are mostly powerless, voiceless nonvoters. But not you, right? So if not for moral reasons, then for economic ones, you need to make your voice heard, and fast.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
